Today, Ukraine's youth national team will play its third match in the Euro 2025 qualifiers against England, and tomorrow Serhii Rebrov's national team will meet Malta in the Euro 2024 adult qualifiers. However, another team that Ukraine received as a result of this year's historic youth Euro, in which Ruslan Rotan's boys were among the four best teams on the continent and qualified for the Olympic Games in Paris, has completely fallen out of sight.
Today, we know the names of exactly half of the participants in the 2024 World Cup, among whom football Ukraine will be represented for the first time in its history. This success received enough attention in the summer, but time passed and the achievements of Rotan's team were somehow forgotten. The leaders of the UAF were not ready for the Olympic victories either, and tried to temporarily disband the coaching staff of the new national team, which did not seem to be part of their plans. That is, our Olympic team seems to have been created, but in fact it still does not exist. Let's try to explain why...
Of course, there is still plenty of time before the Olympics, which will be held next summer in France. At the moment, only eight of the 16 participants in the football tournament are known. But the fact is that almost all of them have ALREADY started preparing for this historic event. After some friendly matches are played today, we will be able to state that four national teams have already played sparring matches, with Egypt having four such games and Morocco having three. In November, the European teams will join them. France and Spain have scheduled an Olympic team meeting for this month. Israel has also planned one, but for obvious reasons, these are only plans.
Thus, only two teams have not announced their Olympic prospects - Ukraine and Mali. Even the Dominican Republic has started preparing for the event in France, but for some reason we don't need it. Why?
It should be noted that it is not easy to hold an Olympic team training camp, especially in terms of staffing. On FIFA dates, the national and youth national teams of Ukraine play their official matches, where a good half of the players recruited by Ruslan Rotan play. It is possible to gather not in the most optimal composition, and this raises another issue that needs to be raised today.
The fact is that the dates of the Olympic tournament are not on the official FIFA calendar. In late July and early August, the Ukrainian championship will take place, and our leading clubs will be fighting for tickets to the group rounds of European competitions.
Can anyone guarantee that Shakhtar or Dynamo will release their leading players when they are competing for the Champions League and a substantial financial bonus? I can't, so I think this issue needs to be resolved in the highest offices. If it is not resolved, then the second team of our national team will go to the Olympics, and in this case, today, in November and in March, we need to hold training camps for potential reservists.
As you can see, everything is very confusing. Everything except, I am convinced, one thing - the desire and ability of the coaching staff of the now Olympic team of Ukraine to work for the future. By the way, the new coach of the youth team, Unai Melgosa, called 29 players to his two training camps - 20 of them (70%) already have experience of playing for the "youth", and nine (!) played at Euro 2023.
For comparison, at the beginning of 2019, when Rotan started working in this team, he had only six players who had already played in the youth team. And if then they were players with one or two matches, today Melgosa can count on Kostiantyn Vivcharenko (24 games for the youth team before the start of the new qualifying round) and Arseniy Batahov (23), Bohdan Viunnyk (22) and Volodymyr Brazhko (15), Maksym Bragara (15) and Oleh Ocheretko (15), Ruslan Neshcheret (10) and Anton Bol (7). That is, it is not just the backbone of the team - it is almost the whole team!
Two more players, who are the same age as the Spanish youth coach, were transferred to the national team by their predecessors a long time ago: Heorhii Sudakov (20 matches for the youth team) and Vladyslav Vanat (11).
The work for the future was achieved in a situation where we did not have an intermediate U-20 team, and we had to build the team directly in official trials. Nevertheless, as soon as Rotan had the opportunity to play the squad, he used it. Do you remember the failed Lobanovsky Tournament, for which the coaches gathered the team straight from their holidays (instead of a week, they had... two days to prepare)? And there was also a training camp in Georgia, where Ruslan Petrovich even took the second team, because a competitive team cannot be built online.
It is a pity that today a progressive domestic specialist seems to be mired in the black soil of the Oleksandriya community, in a team that local managers began to reformat in the midst of the season, but the result is needed now and the coaching staff is responsible for it.
But any coach, like us, needs quality preparation for the Olympics. It seems that there, in France, we can play not only according to the main Olympic principle. To do this, we need to pay at least a little attention to the team, and they will thank us the way they did in the summer on the fields of Romania, when even the most demanding experts and fans enjoyed not only the results of their national favourites, but also their play. At the Youth Euro, our young people united the whole country around them, which needs positive emotions so much right now. Will we be able to do it again at the Olympics? There are no miracles, we need to get into the swing of things today.
Andrey Diev
P.S. The coaches of the Olympic team expressed a desire to assemble the team at least at the end of the year, in December, but football officials insist on starting training in May of the next year, 2024.